Branding Your Small Business
Importance of Giving Your Company an Identity
One popular piece of advice given to small buinsess owners is to define brand identity or product's personality before spending money on advertising or marketing.
Gaining knowledge about successfully branding a business is something small business owners should do before opening a business. The American Marketing Association (AMA) defines a brand as a "name, term, sign, symbol or design, or a combination of them intended to identify the goods and services of one seller or group of sellers and to differentiate them from those of other sellers”. Branding is all about the perception of a product or service. Branding is about getting your potential customers to see you as the only one who provides a solution to a particular problem.
Branding and Customer Loyalty
One important thing to note about branding is that appropriate branding creates loyalty amongst customers. A lot of very successful companies and firms like Wal-Mart, Apple and Google are very popular because of their branding efforts. These company names are synonymous with the solution to certain problems. Wal-Mart is known as the one-stop shop for low prices, Apple is very well known for its ‘i – products’ and Google is known for exceptional searching capabilities. These companies are definitely not the only ones that offer these services at affordable prices in their various industries, but due to branding, they have built themselves very loyal customer bases.
How to Brand Your Business
- Identify your values: Your values form the base of your company and should influence every single decision matter how inconsequential.
- Identify your mission: A mission statement is a very crucial part of your business. Your mission statement is like a condensed version of your business plan. It presents your goal, aims and plans to yourself and your customers.
- Identify your ‘best’ client: Every single business would love to be able to cater to every single customer that walks through the door. Unfortunately, businesses cannot serve everybody. As a business owner, the biggest mistake you can make is trying to please everyone. It waters down the effectiveness of your service and it doesn’t help you build customer loyalty.
- Benefits vs. features: The business world today operates in a “what’s in it for me?” environment. Knowing the difference between benefits and features of a product or service is a very essential skill for a business owner to have. Typically, features of a product/service are physical descriptions, but a benefit is the emotional or intangible gain the customer gains.
- Create an experience: Doing business with your company should be an experience with the customer. In today’s business world, it’s all about the level of service or quality of the product. The term experience is what distinguishes your company from others. To create an experience for your customer, you have to b able to answer the question: “What distinguishes my company from my competitors”.
- Feel free to change: As a business owner you should never be afraid to change your mission or reinvent yourself. Always make sure that your business and its goals adapt to whatever changes occur.
A business’ brand exists in the minds of potential customers and clients. A brand represents the entire experience and perception, some of which you (a business owner) can influence, and some that you cannot. It's what your customers think of you and say about you when they've experienced your product or service. A strong brand is invaluable, especially in these times of intense competition in the business world. It is very crucial to spend time investing in exploring, defining, and building your brand. If you can't define your brand, your customers won't be able to, either and you run the risk of having your competitors define it for you.
